I Never Did Either
by trouble in my veins
Summary: Luna is in orbit. Birthday present for Katemione. HarryLuna. Warnings: implied femslash, chan, implied incest.


"**I Never Did, Either"**

**by Nina**

**--**

Dedication: Cassie, my inspiration. This is your birthday present because I love you.  
**Disclaimer:** Despite popular belief, I do not own anything that has anything to do with Harry Potter. However, I am trying to buy the letters "H" and "P."  
**Song: **"Speed of Sound" by Coldplay.

--

Sometimes the moon is a sliver of copper-red and invisible against the stars and sky, and sometimes Harry holds Ginny's hand in the Great Hall under the enchanted ceiling. Sometimes Ginny leans her head (copper curls) on Harry's shoulder and keeps up a brother-sister banter with Ron, her giggles shaking Harry to his skeleton. But the moon doesn't stay copper for long, for it is only the dust-reflection—the moon is dust-reflection sick.

What Harry doesn't tell Ginny is that maybe her moon-sliver (the dust-sick, the deplorable) is not as bright as she would like it to be. Occasionally, her moon is full and fat, yet _only_ occasionally, and it is then that Ginny's stars shine with the drunken excitement of fireflies.

--

Harry's system is a lunar one, and he feels like the tides, pulled by the drugged, slow moons (all the moons) that lazily drift in the calm sultry sky of velvet and glinting diamonds. Everywhere in his discreet spiral universe, copper-red moons are falling like meteors, and where the moons once were, stars begin filling the empty black circles until they glisten and glimmer like a jewelry store case.

--

It is Hermione who tells Harry that Ginny is crying and doesn't want to come out of the dormitory, her voice matter-of-fact and obviously imploring.

It is Ron who won't talk to Harry, murmuring things that sound like "corrupted" and "my little sister," yet Harry cannot be sure.

--

"Did you love her?" Luna inquires, eyes round and blue and sky-filled, the frankness of her tone and question a bit unsettling.

"Huh?" Harry stalls, pretending he doesn't hear her, surveying the sun-reflecting lake like a realtor.

"Did you love Ginny?" repeats Luna, as if she hadn't said it already, shifting her weight and pulling her wet shoes from the water.

Harry thinks for some amount of time that feels shorter than a second yet longer than the space of years, staring blankly at the darkening sky as if the answer were to appear there in shimmering letters composed of blue and white. Luna blinks her eyes, and her face is picturesque and ultimately far off.

Maybe she knows more than she lets on.

"Er—I don't suppose I did," mumbles Harry, trying to recall a time where he ever felt at home in Ginny's moon-shadows, and finding he never did.

The sun is low and Luna creates a solar eclipse, her ink-black shadow mingling with equally dark blades of grass, the sun spilling from behind her and creating an aura, silhouetting her.

"I never did either."

Harry has no patience and does not wish to wonder what she could possibly mean by this, but in the vast velvet galaxies of thought, star-clusters once filled with copper-red half-smiles of moons are now occupied by half-empty white spheres that rotate slowly on their invisible axes.

"She was nice, but never really cared. I think she may have thought I was mad."

Harry does not know what possesses him to laugh at this, but he does, and Luna joins in as if they are sharing some kind of familiar joke, her radish earrings swaying as the sun-glow behind her fades, leaving the two of them relatively alone together.

--

Hermione gives her tight-lipped, reluctant approval when she sees Luna's hand on Harry's as they sit in the Entrance Hall before a Hogsmeade trip. Ron looks distinctly miffed, and Harry knows that he is wondering why anyone would choose Loony Lovegood and her Crumple-Horned Snorkacks over his own sister.

But it is Luna, permanently surprised and terribly gullible, that shines like the virginal, cratered moon. She is Harry's turbulent moon girl, drawing the tides in and making them retract, her glare a desperate one of a careful dynamic.

--

Luna's body is a silken terrain, a lunar-landscape of skin, the odd bone straining against her too-pale flesh. And maybe it is this frailty—the look of someone needing to be saved that draws Harry to her, because Harry always needs someone to save.

His hands clamor to touch Luna, because she is pure and unsoiled and everything she should be, yet she is a restless enigma that leaves Harry sleepless beside her.

"I never did either," she had said once.

--

Shadows pool across Luna's skin, Harry's fingertips fondling the satin darkness of her celestial body until the vague shadows grow and everything becomes penumbral and eternally stilled.

"Do you love me?" she questions into the darkness of the room above the Hog's Head, her eyes bright in the silvery moonlight sliding in through the window. (It is Luna's dreamy bluntness that makes Harry wonder if she has multiple and conflicting personalities.)

Harry's hand stops where her stomach stops, shivering where her skirt begins. He pulls his hand away, staring at Luna who is now collecting her shirt from the ground. Maybe she forgets that she has asked, bending over to buckle her shoe, Harry retreating to the shadows of the room to retrieve their things.

"Oh, come _on,_ no one ever comes up here—oh!"

--

Ginny's crying contaminates the air with a pitiful whimpering, and Harry watches from his spot of sky as his two moons revolve nearer and nearer. Luna stands slowly, unbending her spine and turning to the cupreous moon, her pureness radiating like an airborne disease.

Ginny's mortified eyes close for a second and flutter back open.

The slow hand of a brother grips her and pulls her back. Luna drifts serenely, slipping her shirt on; writhing into her cardigan. (Oh, how a dust-sick moon looks when it drips with tears…)

"You," Ginny breathes, "up here… with who?"

"Ginny, you never did love me," a stricken sounding Luna says out of nowhere, as Harry unsticks himself from the shadows. A drowsy lull falls on her words. "And I never loved you. I suppose the nargles may have had something to do with that…"

Luna is Harry's turbulent moon girl, an x-shaped aura across her, the scent of night-air in the folds of her clothing.

"I never did either," are the words sticking in Harry's throat: stubborn words, as Ginny's copper curls swing, fading into the black air of the staircase.

--

Sunset sends shadows sprawling across the tops of trees, and Luna lights it up again, because Luna is in orbit as Harry promises her everything, his hand spread in the small of her back.

FIN.


End file.
